First, as though we didn’t already have plenty of evidence to support this Study: Temps affect waters:

A state study of the watersheds of the West, Williams and Saxtons rivers in the southeastern corner of the state shows the biggest environmental problem appears to be increased temperatures, a planner with the Agency of Natural Resources said.

Marie Levesque Caduto, a watershed coordinator with the agency, said Friday the study is one of 17 being conducted on the different watersheds in the state.

The article doesn’t go into real detail, but refers to the importance of cool temperatures to the creatures living inside the rivers, not just the fish, but the creatures the fish eat as well.

The article itself doesn’t necessarily attribute this to global warming, but it’s obvious that this is a contributing factor, along with other factors, noting that:

it was not just the large ponds or lakes behind the flood control dams, which act as giant heat sinks, but that all along the rivers people are cutting trees and shrubs along riverbanks, eliminating its shade which is important not just to fish, but the tiny invertebrates they eat.

The second article is interesting.  It discusses not just phone polling, but what people think after getting some education on the topic.  The results of this sample group were (again, from the Rutland Herald:

strong support for wind and other forms of renewable energy, sharp divisions about nuclear power with high concern about radioactive waste, and very high concern about greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation.

This is not rocket science.  We can make wind power happen in Vermont, and we can find ways to make it happen in ways that greatly improve the quality of our environment.

Vermont’s been very resistant to wind power in some circles.  When I bring it up, it often ends up in this morass of people who claim I’m trying to destroy their mountains, mixed with other people who insist that I’m stupid to ignore the obvious benefits of nuclear power.  You get the idea.  

Vermont has large sections of farm land in very wide-open windy spaces along Lake Champlain.  I suggest that we offer subsidies to some of those farmers (many of whom are struggling to make ends meet) to use portions of their land for small-scale wind projects, designed to bring wind power to their own communities.  I also propose that ski resorts be used as test sites, putting wind turbines at the tops of mountains which have already been converted to commercial use.

I also propose a major investment in hiring researchers to find ways to make wind power more efficient, less damaging to the immediate wildlife and safe for any flying creatures that come near the turbines.  This multi-tiered approach could greatly reduce our dependence on nuclear power and power supplied by Hydro-Quebec.  It combines renewable energy with local economy in ways which are completely win-win.

Per The Rutland Herald:

The Vermont Department of Public Service has asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to put a hold on the relicensure review of Vermont Yankee.

The Douglas administration has joined anti-nuclear groups from Vermont, New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey in an effort to stop the NRC’s relicensing of four nuclear reactors until the commission overhauls its review program. Nuclear companies in those four states have renewal applications pending before the NRC.

Originally posted at http://vnrc.org/article/view/1…

We’ve talked about this a bit before.  I won’t give the whole history, but you can visit Green Mountain Daily’s Pharmacy Fishing Archive for all the stories about collection of personal data by Vermont State Police on medical data from pharmacists throughout the state of Vermont.

Well, it’s just gotten a bit more interesting.  In some of the earlier discussion (I don’t recall how much of this was private discussion and how much was posted online) involved a database to try to get a handle on illegal prescription drug use.  What I didn’t realize at the time was that the Department of Health had already begun developing that database and has, in fact, put out bids for the creation of it.  

I’m a tech geek and know databases and secure information management extensively.  After the fold, I’ll try to explain exactly what this database can do, doing my best to translate tech geek into standard human English.  

For those of you who are tech geeks yourselves, this may sound like I’m talking down to you.  I apologize, but I want this to be understood by the general public, and I want to be thorough.

I’m going to begin by quoting a few items from the requirements set forth by the state for the database:

The contractor will collect data on all Schedule II, III, and IV controlled substances

dispensed by VT licensed pharmacies.

(You can see what drugs fall into the various schedules through the Department of Justice)

A complete record for each prescription dispensed will be stored for six years, and shall be available for query during this period.

“Available for query” means that any authorized user can, at any time, look up information up to six years in the past.

The following data elements will be collected by the application from dispensing pharmacies:

1. Patient full name

2. Patient date of birth

3. Patient’s complete address

4. Prescriber name

5. Prescriber DEA#

6. Pharmacy Identification

7. Pharmacist’s name or initials

8. Generic or brand name of drug dispensed

9. National Drug Code for the drug dispensed

10. Quantity of drug dispensed

11. Dosage

12. Number of days supply dispensed

13. Number of refills prescribed

14. Date drug dispensed

15. Source of payment

16. If the patient is an animal, the patient’s name and species, along with the owner’s full name, DOB, and address.

I think this is mostly self-explanatory; from what I understand, people who prescribe medications have Drug Enforcement Agency codes which ID them to Federal Officials.  I’m assuming source of payment is relevant because cash payments are believed to be more likely in criminal transactions than credit car payments.

More from the requirements:

The contractor will be an Application Service Provider, hosting the Vermont Prescription Monitoring System (VPMS). The contractor shall utilize and maintain all hardware and software for the VPMS application, throughout the life of the resulting contract.

This may take some explanation.  Here’s the deal: an “Application Service Provider” means that the person who handles this bid will, themselves, be hosting the system.  In other words, instead of having it housed on secure servers by the state itself, a private company will be holding onto all the data.  

This means that although the company will be required to maintain strict security codes, there’s little the State of Vermont can do to guarantee that security.  There is no motive for the company hired to do this work to reveal security breaches on their part, because doing so could place their corporate interests in jeopardy.

Really, for me, this is what it boils down to:

1. If we’re going to collect this data (I’m not convinced we need to, but if we do it, we need to do it better than this), it has to have a firewall of some sort with respect to access of data.  Specifically:
   
   
   • separate access for personal names (for routine data cleanup, elimination of duplicate records, etc.), which aren’t connected to medications or history, combined with…
   • a set of criteria for revealing the names.  I.e., if the same individual has prescriptions at four different pharmacies in a six-month period, then it can trigger a report which allows law enforcement to determine whether or not an investigation is warranted, but without those specific triggers, a warrant is required to obtain the information.



2. If we’re going to collect this data, it needs to be housed somewhere where we can keep an eye on it, not where some corporation somewhere may or may not have any strong motivation to keep the information private



3. The proposal itself uses the terms “HIPAA compliant” and “fully HIPAA compliant” without ever defining explicitly what is meant by those terms.  These are terms which are relatively ambiguous, though they don’t sound this way on the surface.  They’re open to so much interpretation that we need to be specific as to exactly what the Vermont Department of Health assumes HIPAA to require and how it expects to meet those requirements.

One final thought: having the information stored like this has real potential in politics down the line.  Someone who opposes a sitting governor or legislator can easily covertly track down personal information about them and leak it to the press through the system as described in the proposal.  To me, this is a very big deal.

Per the Rutland Herald:

It’s unusual for a state agency to ask legislators to repeal part of a brand-new law, but the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources and Gov. James Douglas are doing just that.

They want to repeal a section of Act 43 passed last year that is part of the effort to clean up Lake Champlain. Douglas and the agency say that the $59 million Vermonters could be compelled to spend under the law on sewage plant upgrades across two-thirds of Vermont would be better spent on reducing “non-point” pollution like farm runoff.

And while everyone agrees that the goal is to reduce phosphorous levels in the lake, which causes massive algae growths and encourages invasive species, the agency and environmentalists disagree on approach.

Environmentalists want to see the state tackle pollution from wastewater treatment plants and non-point pollution sources. Secretary of the Agency of Natural Resources George Crombie says the state can’t afford to subsidize this two-pronged approach; he wants to focus on nonpoint pollution sources; he says it will be more effective and less costly.

If you’re confused about what “non-point” means, don’t feel bad– I had to take a little time to sort it out.  Here’s what it boils down to: non-point pollution is general pollution generated by operations from such localized sources as farm runoff.

So here’s what the administration is asking for, in a nutshell:

They want us to stop trying to make large corporations accountable for their own pollution and instead focus our resources on farms and localized runoff, which is, at this point, impossible to measure.  But they’re sure it will help some, even though they have no evidence:

“Where is the money going to come from” for the wastewater plants upgrades? asks Karen Horn of the Vermont League of Cities and Towns, which supports the repeal. “There are much more productive ways to spend our energy and our money.”

And while it might be difficult to measure the amount of phosphorous removed from the lake by efforts like placing buffer strips along waterways and keeping cows out of the rivers, the impact of that effort will – some day – be seen, Horn said.

“You will eventually know. The lake will respond,” she said.

So, right: we can do what we enacted into law (and our governor signed into law) or we can decide that it’s just too difficult and only focus on issues which don’t affect corporations and don’t affect large-scale waste treatment plants.  

Sometimes, the news just gives me a headache.

Per the Rutland Herald:

Marking the 35th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, some 280 Vermonters marched on the Statehouse on Saturday to decry legalized abortion and celebrate the defeat last year of a bill that would have permitted physician-assisted suicide.

I just want to note that Brattleboro High School students alone staged a protest of about 200 people earlier this year.  This was Montpelier, much larger than Brattleboro, and all they could come up with for anti-abortion protesters was 280?  

Good job, guys.  Way to press the issue.

Okay, that said, more from the Herald:

Vermont Right to Life is backing three pieces of legislation this year…One would create a new ability to sue under Vermont law when a fetus is killed in an accident resulting from negligence; a second would call for notification of parents of minors seeking an abortion; the third would require abortion clinics to offer patients an opportunity to see an ultrasound of the fetus.

I’m going to take these one at a time:

1. One would create a new ability to sue under Vermont law when a fetus is killed in an accident resulting from negligence
   
   I honestly have no real problem with this.  I don’t see any reason that someone shouldn’t be able to sue should someone else do them damage which hurts  a developing fetus, even if no other injury occurs.



2. a second would call for notification of parents of minors seeking an abortion
   
   I have a serious problem with this.  When minors seek abortions covertly, it’s common for them to do so out of genuine fear of what will happen should their parents find out.  This is, primarily, an intimidation tactic designed to discourage minors from seeking legal abortions.



3. the third would require abortion clinics to offer patients an opportunity to see an ultrasound of the fetus
   
   This is another tactic designed to prey on people in vulnerable situations.  If a woman is at an abortion clinic to have a pregnancy terminated, she’s there because she made a choice.  The state has no right to question her choice after the fact or to assume that she’s too stupid or ignorant to know what that choice means and entails.

Fortunately, I see little chance that 2 or 3 would come to the current legislature, but it’s still good to keep tabs on the opposition’s tactics.

When it comes to the conventions in 2008, people won’t be electing their candidates.  Delegates will.    The delegates are representatives of political parties and their candidates, and given how delegates split, parties can easily end up supporting people who have received less than 40% of their party’s voters.  

Much of this delegate system is set up in the early stages of the system, without allowing many of the states to vote, providing a system in which a select few states very early in the process get to make crucial decisions as to who the final nominee will be.  This can result in nominees choosing poor early candidates which look good on the surface, but don’t result in someone who can easily make it through to the final election.

So instead, I present a simple proposal: eliminate primaries, and eliminate the power of individual parties to choose for the American public who will be nominated.

Instead, let’s go with a fairly easy solution: instant runoff voting (1-2-3) voting.  

Let’s not eliminate candidates based on early mistakes and stumbles or amount of money they’ve raised at crucial points.  Instead, let’s go with as many candidates who want to run, who can afford to get their names on the ballots and, come election day, do instant runoff voting.  

The process is simple:

Let’s assume that you have the following slate of candidates:

Rudy Guiliani

John Edwards

John McCain

Hillary Clinton

Mitt Romney

Barack Obama

Ron Paul

Dennis Kucinich

Fred Thompson

Duncan Hunter

Cynthia McKinney

Alan Keyes

(I probably missed someone.  Please, if I missed your candidate, let it go)

So when it comes to voting, we don’t do a primary system.  Instead, we do our usual voting process, but instead of going with just selecting our favorite candidate (thus risking a John McCain 23% of the vote “victory”), we instead put in our choices as follows.  In my case, this would probably be:

1. John Edwards

2. Barack Obama

3. Hillary Clinton

So, on election night, the results of the 1st choices come in the following order:

1. Hillary Clinton (22%)

2. John McCain (19%)

3. Barack Obama (18%)

4. Mitt Romney (15%)

5. John Edwards

6. Ron Paul

7. Dennis Kucinich

8. etc…

Now… with no one getting over 50% of the vote, we go through an elimination process: remove any candidate with less than 15% of the vote and try again, moving 2nd and/or 3rd to the top.  

This has several advantages: first, it leaves us the ability to choose less popular candidates (such as Dennis Kucinich) without feeling as though we’re throwing away our votes, because our second choice candidate can get the chance when our 1st choice doesn’t make the cut.

This also has the advantage of creating consensus candidates; for any candidate to win, s/he has to appear on the top three of a lot more people than just the simple majority winner.

There are certainly problems with IRV, but they are more technical than problematic (what percentage is the cutoff, how many rounds do we do; do we eliminate one candidate at a time, or just eliminate anyone below a certain threshold, how many choices to we get to make: 3?  4?  5?).  

As things stand, however, we end up in the situation where any candidate has to pass a test not just with voters, but with party elders who can have a powerful influence on the process (especially with the superdelegate system that the Democrats have worked out under the old guard).  

But imagine, though, if 50% of the country was voting Democrat but had trouble deciding between the three candidates; instead of ridiculous infighting over who our nominee would be, we’d all get to choose our sequence between the top three of our favoring without having to worry about which of our candidates would more easily beat John McCain.  

I don’t know that this is a perfect solution, but it’s got to be better than what I’m seeing today.

Per today’s Brattleboro Reformer:

If Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant is closed in 2012, an Entergy spokesman said, it will be at least a decade after that before the decommissioning fund reaches the level necessary to pay for cleanup of the site.

But if it closes in 2032, the fund will have grown to the point that cleanup could start right away. In fact, there would be so much money left over after cleanup that every household in Vermont would get a refund check.

In other words, if you let us stay open we’ll be able to pay for closing the plant, but if you don’t, you’ll be stuck with the bill.

Now here’s the thing: it’s not that Entergy doesn’t necessarily have the money for this cleanup.  It’s that they don’t have it in their allocated fund.

Let me present a simpler example:

I make a deal with a local farmer, telling him “I’d like to use your land for a composting project for the next five years.  It will be a mess, but I’ll clean everything up when I’m done.”  He asks “how can I be sure you’ll clean it all up?”  “I’ll set aside a portion of the profits for the cleanup so I’m sure it will be fine.”  

Then, five years later, I tell him “well, there isn’t enough money in the portion I reserved for the cleanup to do it right, so it will take another ten years for me to get that fund to where it needs to do the cleanup properly.”  

“Okay, I’ve had it,” he tells me, “just clean this stuff up and get off my land.”  

“But if I do that,” I tell him, “I won’t have the money to do the clean-up.  I need to keep the business open for another ten years to be able to pay for it.”

“Don’t you have any money from other sources to clean it up?”  

“Well, sure,” I explain, “but that’s not part of what I put aside.”

“You can’t use that other money to clean up my land?” he asks.

“Of course not!  All that money is in different funds.  If I use that money to clean up your land then I won’t be able to pay for the clean up over at Mrs. Henderson’s place.  That’s just the way it is.  If you don’t like, you’re screwed.”

“Maybe I should sue you.”

“I’ve got five lawyers in my family and if you try to sue me over this, they’ll keep it tied up in court for the next ten years.  Better to just let me keep operating for those ten years.”

You get the idea.

All ye who support Edwards, abandon hope!  Your candidate is doomed, I tell you, doomed!

You should immediately shift your support to [ Obama / Clinton ], otherwise [ Clinton / Obama ] will get the nomination and will cause us to lose to [ Huckabee / Romney / McCain / the Pilsbury Dough Boy / Satan ].  

If you fail to shift your support from Edwards to [ Obama / Clinton ], you are personally responsible for the nomination of  [ Clinton / Obama ].  You can not hope to win, so you must change your allegiance in order to prevent the obvious problems a campaign by [ a black man / someone named Clinton ] will face come November.  

It is now your responsibility to join the side of [ Obama / Clinton ].  For it is spoken, with less than 1% of elected Delegates now decided, that the election will come down to just two people and only one can defeat [ Fred Thompson / Dr. Octopus / the Incredible Hulk / Ron Paul ] come November!  

You.  Have.  Been.  Warned.

This is about my experience working on Edwards campaign, but it says nothing bad about any Democratic candidate.

Primary season in New Hampshire is odd.  I’m sure, to many of the locals, it’s like a plague of locusts has descended upon the region, having taking an odd migratory stopover on their way from Iowa to South Carolina, Nevada, or some other region.  

For three of the last four days, I was one of those locust.  I already wrote about seeing Edwards in Keene on Sunday (the one day out of the last four we didn’t canvas) and canvassing  and then later seeing Edwards on Saturday.

Today I’m just writing about the experiencing of canvassing, which I’ve done before in previous elections (for Paul Hodes in 2006, for Howard Dean in 2004), and what it means to walk a neighborhood in support of a candidate.

There’s always a problem with me for knocking on peoples’ doors.  I hate it when people knock on my door unsolicited.  So when out with campaign literature, we try to be very respectful of people’s boundaries.  Any house that has any sign outside that indicates “do not disturb,” “no soliciting,” etc… we’d turn around and leave them and mark it on our list.  If they had signs inside their windows indicating specific support for any candidate, we just marked that and moved on.

The list we went from was specific; we didn’t just knock on anyone’s door.  We visited people who were known Democrats or independents who didn’t indicate a final decision on their candidate.  Most of the people we encountered were polite.  We did encounter one Romney supporter, which was a bit of a surprise, and we skipped the house with the giant McCain sign on their lawn, because, really, why approach a house with a sign that’s designed as though it’s meant to be a threat?

I don’t know where this is going.  I don’t know what’s happening tonight.  I don’t know what’s happening in the next primaries.  Three weeks ago, no one was predicting Edwards defeating Clinton in Iowa, just as no one (that includes me) is predicting Edwards defeating Obama in South Carolina. Obama’s got tons of momentum and I’m learning to make peace with the idea of his candidacy.  If that’s how it’s going, I hope he turns out to be a lot more left-wing than his campaigning suggests, but we’ll see.  

In the meantime, campaigning was fun.  Even people who voted for other candidates were friendly for the most part.  A pair of Clinton supporters invited us into their house to warm up this morning.  We ran into an Obama canvasser at one point and traded helpful tips (“the guy at #4 has already voted for Obama” — “The house at #5 both just told us they voted for Clinton”  — “the house at #3 is up for sale and the owners have moved out,” etc.)  I’ve read other posts about dirty tricks from the Obama and Clinton campaigns.  I don’t discount the possibility of stupid juvenile tricks coming from any political campaign, but we had an Obama supporter covering some of the same houses we covered (some before, some after) and there was no indication that he stole or threw out any of the literature we left.  We covered houses in a neighborhood with Clinton supporters who had left door knockers on houses which already had Edwards and Obama knockers and no campaign had tried to remove or hide the other campaign’s literature, at least as far as we could tell.  

I know everything is a bit tense right now, but really, we do have people disagreeing not out of hostility but out of valid differences as to what’s best for the country.  One of my neighbors is a Clinton supporter and I respect why she’s made that choice.  There’s no hostility over our differences.  

A lot of people we talked to Monday said they were still undecided but they didn’t want to hear another word from anyone from any campaign.  I can’t blame them.  I made sure I put them on the “don’t ever bother again” list.  

A couple fun notes about the day:

1. when I walked into the Edwards office to do phone work on Saturday, after we had spent the morning canvassing, one of the other phone bankers was Granny D.  That was awesome.  I got to introduce myself to her and tell her how much I admired her.  She offered me an egg;
2. this is anecdote, third-hand, so take it with a grain of salt, but apparently a few Rudy supporters decided to canvas for their candidate by wearing Yankees gear.  

   In New Hampshire;

   Talk about not knowing your target audience!

3. When doing phone calling, I got a big-time Kucinich supporter who wasn’t hearing any of my Edwards spiel, but instead decided he wanted to try to talk me onto his side.  It was entertaining, but mutually futile in the end
4. we have pranksters in NH, that I’m sure are not at all connected to the campaigns.  This is not surprising.  Apparently, overnight, someone stole a few signs from a Romney house’s lawn, and replaced them with 50+ Edwards signs, arranged in geometric patterns.  Everything about this makes me think “college prank.”    I don’t see why anyone involved in any campaign would do this, but even I can see the humor in it.

   You kids!  Get off that lawn!.

So, now… I’m basically exhausted.  I’ve spent the better part of four days working for a candidate whom I know will not come in first.  I got to shake his hand and thank him on Sunday, which was really a treat.  I walked over five miles today, and almost that much yesterday.  Twenty years ago, walking five miles for a candidate wouldn’t have meant that much to me, but today it seems as though there’s a certain labor of love involved in this.

The most common theme I got from people was that it’s really nice to have good choices of good candidates.  I’ve posted before about why I would rather have Edwards as the nominee than any other choice, but I’m not going to talk about that any further here.  He’s my guy, but I totally get why he’s not everyone’s guy, and I totally get why many people are making the choices they’re making.

So here’s my final comment: whomever you’re supporting in this race, if you’ve volunteered for any Democratic candidate, thank you.  You’re doing something important, even if I disagree with your choice.  It’s a lot of work to take time out from your schedule to campaign for a candidate.  It’s draining, exhausting, both physically and emotionally.  Win or lose, your effort is of value.

(crossposted to Daily Kos)